Shader Tools for Visual Studio

GLSL and HLSL editing that feels native to Visual Studio.

Shader Tools adds IntelliSense, compiler diagnostics, navigation, parameter hints, formatting and shader-specific tooling to Visual Studio.

Features

• GLSL and HLSL IntelliSense
• Compiler diagnostics through glslang, DXC and Naga
• Hover information and signature help
• JetBrains-style parameter name hints
• Go to Definition and Ctrl+Click navigation
• Navigation through GLSL, HLSL and HLSLI includes
• Code folding and inactive-code highlighting
• Shader variants
• Formatting through clang-format
• Shader Explorer for variants and symbols
• Basic WGSL support

Visual Studio integration

Shader Tools can reuse the colors from your Visual Studio C++ editor, so shader code matches the rest of your project.

If Visual Assist is installed, its C++ colors can be used for shaders as well.

Example

Project configuration

Project-specific settings can be stored in .shadertools.json.

Example:

{
  "includes": ["shaders/include"],
  "defines": {
    "USE_SHADOWS": "1"
  },
  "glsl": {
    "targetClient": "None",
    "spirvVersion": "None"
  }
}

Shader variants can be configured using .shader-variants.json

Requirements

• Visual Studio 2022 17.14+ or Visual Studio 2026
• Windows x64
• clang-format is required only for formatting

The language server and DXC are bundled with the extension.

Source code

Shader Tools is open source:

GitHub repository

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